Contents

Freedom in the World was launched in 1973 by Raymond Gastil. It produces annual scores representing the levels of political rights and civil liberties in each state and territory, on a scale from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free). Depending on the ratings, the nations are then classified as "Free", "Part(ial)ly Free", or "Not Free".[4] The report is often used by researchers in order to measure democracy and correlates highly with several other measures of democracy such as the Polity data series.[5]

The rankings below are from the Freedom in the World 2010,[7] 2011,[8] 2012,[9] 2013,[10] 2014,[11] 2015,[12] 2016[13], 2017[14] and 2018[15] surveys, each reflecting findings covering the previous year. Each pair of political rights and civil liberties ratings is averaged to determine an overall status of "Free" (1.0-2.5), "Part(ial)ly Free" (3.0-5.0), or "Not Free" (5.5-7.0).[16]

An asterisk (*) indicates countries which are "electoral democracies". To qualify as an "electoral democracy", a state must have satisfied the following criteria:

A competitive, multiparty political system;

Universal adult suffrage for all citizens (with exceptions for restrictions that states may legitimately place on citizens as sanctions for criminal offenses);

Regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security, and the absence of massive voter fraud that yields results that are unrepresentative of the public will; and

Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning.

An electoral democracy must have a score of 7 or more out of 12 in political rights subcategory A (Electoral Progress), an overall aggregate score of 20 in their political rights rating and an overall aggregate score of 30 in their civil liberties rating.[17]

Freedom House's term "electoral democracy" differs from "liberal democracy" in that the latter also implies the presence of a substantial array of civil liberties. In the survey, all Free countries qualify as both electoral and liberal democracies. By contrast, some Partly Free countries qualify as electoral, but not liberal, democracies.[16]